A Stone Boat Read online

  We paid for the workbench, and went back out to the street, and the mood passed. On the way home we talked about a workbench Bernard had had and loved as a child. I told him I’d get him the same one we’d just bought when his birthday rolled around. “With two boxes of nails,” I said.

  • • •

  I had arranged for us to spend the weekend away. I felt that I owed Bernard, not least because I had been so vague to him on the phone from New York. I had a nasty feeling that I had often not sounded very pleased to hear from him, which was hardly fair. And I had an inkling that there were rough times ahead, that there was going to be a great deal of driving to airports and organizing suppers and dealing with my plumber. And besides—I wanted some time for us to be just the two of us. I wanted something romantic and intimate and relaxing, a weekend during which I could store up the ammunition of Bernard’s affection like an arsenal against the onslaught of my mother’s illness. I wanted a spa vacation.

  So I booked us rooms in a country-house hotel that had been recommended by our family travel agent. This was my first mistake; but no one I knew made a practice of going to stay in country-house hotels, and I had insufficient time to phone around and do research and find out about various places. Bernard would have known of places, and would have reveled in the research, but I felt that to ask him to make the practical arrangements was like sending someone shopping for his own birthday present. I wanted to surprise him. And I wanted to do something with him that was my idea, instead of living with him in his flat and eating his food and driving in his car and all in all taking on rather too much of his life. I, after all, had a life, and had had a life since long before Bernard had entered the picture. It was really quite an interesting life, though the details were not so well negotiated; but I had been letting it slide, and I was afraid that it might wither from neglect.

  I had a brochure from the hotel in which it looked charming, as such places generally do in their own brochures. The rolling lawns went on for miles, and the sun filtered through the branches of the glorious old trees, and the gardens were as colorful as the land of Oz. The house itself was enormous and slightly Gothic and full of original furnishings of great beauty. The dining room looked as though it had sometimes held minor royalty and had delighted them. The bedrooms were grand and comfortable and full of inviting upholstery. It was possible to see, in several of the photos, Victorian-looking retainers in their pleasant and appropriate garb, imparting an air of period dignity to the many modern appointments which had been gracefully incorporated into the otherwise unaltered building.

  What these photographs signally failed to show were the other guests, as dreary a lot of aging golfers as one could hope to find. And in fact, the splendors of the place, so persuasive in the photographs, were in reality outlandish. The faithful retainers had been made to look just a bit too faithful, and were kitted up in outfits that I suspect were left over from TV productions of Evelyn Waugh. The superior paneling had been hyper-glossed and buffed; it was original, but it now bore an uncanny resemblance to the simulated wood used in cars. There was more upholstery than I had ever imagined in one place; you felt the whole time that you were sinking into the marshmallow kingdom. And everything was presented with a manner of British high seriousness that would have been fully credible (and perhaps somewhat more appropriate) at a coronation.

  Bernard and I drove up to this place in his funny car, an elderly MG with faded green paint and bottle-green seats. We parked it among the many new Mercedeses and Jaguars. I got out and went ahead to check in. Bernard was trying to get the parking brake to work—Bernard was always trying to get the parking brake to work—and so he did not follow immediately. “Welcome,” said the man at the front desk when I had passed through the oak doors. “We’ve been expecting you,” he said. “We have a lovely room with a view of the gardens, as you requested.”

  It was at this moment that Bernard walked in. He stood beside me and we both smiled benignly, and the man at the front desk looked down anxiously at his ledger. “Lovely room, good view, large bath, double bed?” he said with subservient cordiality. I wondered whether he had had occasion to use this euphemistic line before.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I replied, to his evident dismay.

  A man in starchy cutaways conducted us to one of the state chambers, in which there was a bed sufficiently large to support a full joint session of Parliament. The view from our window was rather wonderful, and apart from the curious stares of the three younger members of staff who soon brought up our two suitcases, we saw no reason to feel self-conscious. It was, after all, the modern and permissive era, and we felt that the novelty of our relationship could shock only just so far. We ordered a fantastically elaborate cream tea, and had a butler sort of fellow light a fire in the fireplace (it was a chilly day; we were in a chilly part of Britain) and then we roared with laughter. In a funny way, the setting became romantic because it so isolated us, and we pretended to each other that what was novel in the eyes of the locals was only the extent of our affection. I was never in love with Bernard, but I did love Bernard—and sitting in front of that fire with the cream tea looking inviting, I felt great waves of fondness.

  Bernard and I chatted; we read books; we went for a brief stroll in the garden, but it was too cold and damp for that to be much fun, and after Bernard had identified various flowers (Bernard’s horticultural knowledge never ceased to astonish me) we went back in and I took a long hot bath while Bernard paced up and down. I should explain that Bernard, for all his opiate effect, was not himself a relaxed person. I am also not a relaxed person, and relaxed people make me uneasy, as I always suspect them either of knowing something I do not or of being too stupid to see what is perfectly obvious. Bernard, however, was always apparently tense about things like the plumber and the flowers, and he was never tense about things like the essential singularity of human experience and the inadequacy of the spirit. Since I was, in fact, not particularly tense about the things that made Bernard tense, his tension always relaxed me. As I watched him pacing up and down, I felt in my heart of hearts that these problems were solvable, and I foolishly extrapolated that my own problems were also solvable, and I sank down deeper in the bath, and rested a foot on the spigot, and blew paths through the mounting bubbles, and felt that New York was as far away as Pluto. When I got out of the bath, I phoned my mother, as I had done every day in England, as I would do every day I spent abroad throughout her illness. The effect was as abrupt and disconnecting as an unplanned rocket flight to the outermost planet of our solar system.

  • • •

  I did not originally move to London to escape my parents; or, at any rate, I did not go there only to escape them. I went there because I had come to feel that I had no volition in the United States, that my life was the outcome of circumstances over which I could never gain control. And I went there to escape from myself and my nationality, having never been so keen on either one as I might have wished. I knew, of course, that I could not really take on another nationality. What I failed to understand was that you can give up your own nationality only too easily, without knowing that you are doing it, without voting in a foreign election or joining another army or mutilating your passport. You cannot sell your sense of place, cannot exchange it for another sense or a sense of another place, but you can lose it as completely and irretrievably as a vodka tonic poured into the ocean.

  Much of what I gained in England now seems trivial to me, but it was not so small at the time. Did I muster any kind of real independence? Helen was later to say to me, over one of those many glasses of white wine in New York: “You put an ocean between yourself and your parents, and then you just watched them drink it.” She sounded almost angry when she said it. And it was true: I had thought I had crossed the Rubicon and settled on its far side, but by degrees and by wonders of telecommunication and in the end by the progress of symptoms, my parents reduced the Atlantic Ocean unt
il it was smaller than the English Channel, smaller than the Hudson, until it was hardly a creek. These days, I think of that ocean mostly as an inconvenience.

  Every one of our family trips to Europe, the trips that seem to demarcate my childhood, included England. When I was in my teens, I twice went with my father on weeklong business trips to England, which fell in February, when Freddy did not have school vacation, which meant that he and my mother could not accompany us. My father and I would have breakfast and dinner together, and in between I would entertain myself, wandering the city, trying to imagine that I was a resident, striding manfully through the snow in Hyde Park or else drifting from museum to museum, from shop to shop, looking at concert halls where I dreamed of playing, or attending obscure recitals, as one does in foreign cities. I would sometimes have friends in London, and I would play at being my mother, sweeping them up into the glamour of smart restaurants to which my father encouraged me to invite them. I defined a life in London that was very much my own, long ago, before I went to live there. I never felt in London, as I did in Paris, that I was unequal to the city itself, to the scale my mother had brought to it.

  Helen spent a year abroad in England when we were fifteen, and she and I spent a week of that year together. My father was having one of his business trips, and so I stayed with him at the hotel; Helen was living in Hampstead. It was among our best weeks. It was February, but it was one of those spells of April weather that sometimes fall, in Britain, in the middle of winter, and on a bright Wednesday we woke to the essence of spring. We decided to go to Brighton, to see the pavilion. I had the hotel pack a picnic, and Helen came and met me in the lobby. The hall porter asked me where our car was, and when I explained that we were taking the train, he looked somewhat taken aback, and gestured at a porter with a picnic basket shaped like a straw suitcase, as heavy as the suitcase in which I had conveyed a week’s worth of clothing to the UK, and wondered whether I would like to consider a car, which he could easily arrange. I said thank you, and that we were quite happy as we were, and took the basket from the porter.

  We took the train, an eleven o’clock train that was almost empty, through the unseasonal sunshine, and we talked about Helen’s year in England and about girls’ schools and about my father and about Helen’s crazy mother and about the prospect of going to college someday. When we arrived in Brighton we found a map, and we took turns carrying the enormous straw suitcase until we finally made it down to the beach. There were only about six people on the beach; one young man had taken off his shirt and was sitting with his bare chest propped toward the sun. Helen and I agreed that the British were incredible; it was a bizarrely warm day, but we were glad, with the wind coming off the sea, of our sweaters. We took out a large white tablecloth and then we unpacked lunch. We decided to eat immediately since neither of us wanted to go on carrying the food. There were different kinds of sandwiches, and chicken legs and mineral water and champagne and a thermos of tea and the inevitable strawberries with cream and castor sugar and various sticky cakes and, because the insect kingdom is slow to respond to the eccentricities of British weather, there were no bugs of any kind, and Helen and I sat with the sun reflecting up at us and we ate until we thought we might burst. Then we sat, staring out at the water, and talked about poetry—we liked poetry—and felt as though we had discovered the very idea of picnics and could claim it for our own. The whole world seemed to belong to us, the stony beach and the glittering domes of the pavilion and the train that would go back to London. And Helen’s hair blew around in the wind and her eyes caught the light, and she looked so very beautiful and knew so little of it—and indeed, I, too, knew very little of it at the time.

  We decided to go for a walk. But what on earth was one to do with the straw suitcase and all that cutlery, all those linens and all that blue-and-gold china? Helen was living in a school sort of way, in an uncomfortable and ill-equipped house, and such supplies seemed invaluable. It did not occur to us that the hotel might want them back. “I shall have a springtime of picnics,” she announced. We soon grew tired of carrying the suitcase, and there did not seem to be a coatroom anywhere, and so Helen found a public convenience and hid the picnic suitcase in the ladies’ side, in a stall, and we went strolling along the beach. Later, we went to the pavilion, and Helen transferred the basket to another public convenience; then she left it at the train station while we took a final walk though town; and then we collected it and carried it back to London. If the hall porter wondered where its contents had gone, he was much too tactful to comment.

  • • •

  All these years later, I was with Bernard in a country-house hotel. It was not what I had imagined for myself; it was the life into which I had tumbled readily and, in the end, easily. It was the path of least resistance (for all that it had looked difficult) that had dumped me with this strawberry-blond man among all this upholstery. Helen, who had tried to explain England to me when we were off on our picnic, ten years earlier, was back in America, and I was the one who had settled in Britain. I had arrived quite naturally at agonizing American self-consciousness at much the same time that I had given way to a lifestyle at which old school friends would have snickered, and did snicker.

  I came out of the bath and settled myself on the bed.

  “Feeling clean?” asked Bernard.

  “Very clean,” I said, and stretched out my long clean limbs. “It’s a dream bathroom in there,” I said.

  “You look like a little angel,” said Bernard, and came over to kiss me. But he had not yet had his bath, and was not as clean as I was, and for some reason I found him slightly ridiculous and a little off-putting. For just a split second, I hated the fact that he was a man. It seemed to me infinitely depressing.

  “Go have a bath,” I said, with a light laugh. “You’ve still got the drive all over you.”

  • • •

  My mother answered the phone on the first ring. As I spoke to her I could see Bernard’s bath in the fireplace mirror. I do not know whether he realized that I could see him, but it would have been too much effort to look away, and so I continued to watch him abstractedly, as though I had intercepted his privacy in transit.

  Bernard had in some way a very beautiful body, long and thin and supple, with none of the musculature of fashion, but with the strange and fascinating lines of a Mannerist drawing. He faced the corner of the bathroom to undress, as though he didn’t want the bidet to see his nakedness, and then walked slowly over to the tub. His movements were awkward without his usual mask of oversized clothing; it seemed that he had never had time to adjust to these attenuated limbs. He filled the tub with hot water, only hot, and watched the steam rise. He moved as if each of his gestures were commanded in some distant spot by some inexplicable intelligence; his hand, turning the spigots, was tortoise-slow. When the tub was nearly full and the steam had taken over the whole bathroom, fogging the mirror and the window and moistening not only the towels, but also the walls, the fluffy chair in the corner, and the book he had placed on the floor by the tub, Bernard ran a hand over the water—over, like a hovercraft—and then, stunned, turned on the cold water and watched it gush into the tub. He lowered himself in slowly, as if he were afraid of the depths. First feet, and then hands; for a moment he was four-legged. Then bottom, and then, so agonizingly slowly, the rest of his body, until only his head floated on the water like a bubble. He took up his book and stared at the pages, but his eyes were motionless, and he did not turn the pages.

  What was the meaning of all this stillness, while I talked on the phone in a voice too low to be heard across the steam? After ten minutes, Bernard put down his book (he had not once turned a page), pinched his nose, and allowed himself to slide underwater altogether. He curled up, as he had curled earlier on the chintz sofa, and he floated, in a little bundle; then he surfaced for air, and then he floated again. The book lay on a tiny ledge beside the spigots, but somehow it did not get sp
lashed. Bernard shampooed his hair, and, to rinse it, he floated again, curled, tight, closed. Afterwards, he stood up, covered himself with a layer of lather, as though soap were a coat, and then went sliding as fast as he could through the water. He leaped out and let the tub drain, and stared at himself in a mirror steamed until it revealed only softness; wrapped in a long towel, he carried his clothes back to the bedroom, returned to my public eye, and retrieved the careful stance I knew so well.

  While my eyes stayed fixed on Bernard in the sliver reflection through the partially open door, I talked to my mother. She was being brave; I hated it when she wept and made demands, but I also hated it when I felt she was not making demands; and as I tried to cheer her when she was sad, I tried to get through to her when she sounded more complacent than her circumstances justified. She told me about a long walk she had had with my father, and said that she was surprised how quickly she seemed to have recovered from the actual surgery. She mentioned friends who had come by that afternoon to see her. She told me that the wigs had arrived, and that she didn’t think they looked too bad. She told me she’d had the piano tuner in. She told me that she was terrified of her chemotherapy, but that she had got used to the idea of it and was almost looking forward to the first treatment, or at least to having the first treatment over with. She told me about the dog’s eye infection, for which she had been giving her drops, and about a novel she had just finished, and she told me that she had bought new sheets for the downstairs bedrooms in the country. And I told her all about the hotel, and made her laugh, and didn’t mention Bernard, and hung up the telephone, and, knowing that the sheets downstairs in the country were in perfect condition, were only a year old and hardly used at all, I felt that Bernard and his bath and his window boxes and dinner with Claire and Michael were full of unspoken sadness, and I looked around the room, our big luxurious room, and I disliked every detail of it. Then, as Bernard came out of the bathroom, I forced a smile, because I knew he would have wanted to comfort me if he had seen me looking sad, and I was much too tired for that.